Russell Brand, populism and a collapsing centre

Russell Brand said nothing unusual in his interview with Jeremy Paxman and yet it's been watched over 9m times and the debate is still raging. Why?

“I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness
and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit from the political class…
[it’s] an indifferent system that really just administrates for large
corporations and ignores the population it was voted in to serve.” This
masterclass in loquacious populism from Russell Brand was shared on social
media by, just about, everyone - and it’s still generating debate. Yet Brand’s
comments were neither complex nor original, so why was this “a
big cultural event”?

For a start, there was its reach: the interview, with the BBC’s
Jeremy Paxman, has been watched over 9m times on YouTube already. What’s more
it wasn’t just the usual political junkies raving about it, quite the opposite:
if Facebook is any guide it seemed initially ignored by writers and journalists
while being reposted endlessly by relatively ‘apolitical’ 20 somethings. For
this demographic (and judged purely on my own news feed) the last political
event to gain such widespread discussion was the death of Margaret Thatcher in
April.

This can’t be explained by Brand’s celebrity alone. Rather
it’s the collision of two moments both a long time in the making, and both
having domestic particularities: the implosion of representative democracy and
the rebalancing of the economy globally. To take the latter, Paul
Mason draws parallels with movements from Taksim Square to Occupy in identifying
the drivers as economic hopelessness and rejection of the life path that now
seems to be on offer:

“…where will the jobs come from
if automation takes over our lives? Where will high wages come from if workers'
bargaining power is just repeatedly stamped down by the process of
globalisation?

“The revolution that's underway
is more about mental and cultural rejection of the story on offer: to leave
college with a heap of debt, to work as a near-slave in your early twenties in
the name of ‘work placement’ or ‘internship’.”

It’s not only jobs but housing; London prices have
risen 10% in just a year, taking the average property price to a staggering
£438,000. To be clear, in the South East owning property is fast becoming a
hereditary matter: without equity drawn from parent’s property you’ll be in a
nursing home by the time you can afford one of your own. Of £237bn worth of
property deals in the last year, £83bn
worth were bought in cash; tides of money are flowing in from Europe, Russia and China looking for easy returns.
Providing stable investments for the world’s super rich comes well before
housing the young. As for social housing, the waiting list currently stands at 1.8m people. As a
percentage of tenures, home ownership since the mid-2000s and is now back at
levels last seen in the 80s (gov.uk)
while in August the buy-to-let boom was showing a year-on-year increase
of 31%. Re-feudalisation is the direction of travel.

But as Mason comments, there is also a deep rejection of
“the corrupt and venal values of those who run society” which in Britain
is simultaneously visceral yet passive.

“Why vote? We know its not going to make any difference”
(Russell Brand)

With Britain’s archaic voting system
the three major parties manage to effectively shut out alternatives with few
exceptions - in England, just one parliamentary seat went to an outsider, the
Greens, in the 2010
general election. For a demonstration of the choice on offer from the big
three parties the BBC’s Question Time on October 24th, the day after
Brand’s interview, was instructive. The topic: energy, where the operating
cartel have announced roughly 10% increases in prices despite no equivalent
change in wholesale prices.

The Lib Dems’ Tim Farron made a theatrical call to “put that
flaming watchdog down!” Next up was the Tories’ Liz Truss, who wore an
embarrassed smirk throughout much of the debate as if she was struggling not to
laugh at the farce of it all. “Energy prices doubled under Labour”, she said.
Yes, we’re screwing you, but they did too.
Labour’s Caroline Flint followed, another bristling with indignation on behalf
of the nation:

“Cameron [hasn’t] got the bottle… six companies dominate 98%
of the market… and something needs to be done about that.”

That ‘something’ sadly eluded the Labour government, of
which Flint was
a member, for their thirteen years in office. Labour too chose the energy
companies over the public. Question Time is now virtually unwatchable: the only
people worth listening to were journalists, Peter Hitchens and Owen Jones, who
responded:

“If you look at the polling, as far as the British people
were concerned what Miliband was proposing [a price freeze] was too moderate – nearly
7 out of 10 want our energy supply back under the control of the British people
under public ownership”

This was met with huge applause, yet not one of the big
three parties will be offering this to voters in 2015, nor was it offered in
2010. Labour’s original 2 year price freeze proposal was itself ludicrously
weak; having burnt someone’s house to the ground you don’t triumphantly offer
them a hoover. When even the Guardian calls such a policy “dramatic”
you have to fear for the nation’s sanity.

Time and again Westminster
demonstrates its capture by private interests. The sell off of Royal Mail,
originally a Labour policy
now completed by the current government, has just seen a healthy, historic and
profitable national asset sold at a fire sale price of £3.3bn. JP Morgan valued
the business at £10bn. Investors have been gifted billions of pounds from
the public purse for something the public didn’t want sold. In a functioning
democracy this fiasco would be under police investigation yet in ‘fantasy
island’ it’s a few wagging fingers. The saddest thing is that this is now
routine:

“Shares in BT jumped from 130p at privatisation to £15 by
1999. Railtrack was sold for £1.9 billion, but within two years had soared in
value to £8 billion. The rolling stock companies were initially valued at
around £3 million, but were subsequently sold for £1.8 million… Former
Chancellor Nigel Lawson went so far as to state in his memoirs that
undervaluation was a deliberate government tactic.” (Guinan
& Hanna)

But to see Brand’s democratic “façade” at its ugliest look
no further than the case of the East Coast mainline. Having finally, and
fortuitously, fallen back into public ownership in 2009, it has been run by
Directly Operated Railways. How has it performed?

“The company has won 13 industry awards since April 2012,
including that of being Britain's
top employer. There has been a 4.2% increase in ticket sales year-on-year,
£208.7m returned to the taxpayer during the year in premium and dividend
payments, and a record level of customer satisfaction.” (The
Guardian)

Even the Financial Times acknowledged
the “state-run East Coast mainline has
emerged as the most efficiently run rail franchise in terms of its reliance on
taxpayer funding”. That is, the sole nationalised line is being run much more
cheaply than any of the privatised lines; this won’t surprise the general
public, 70%
of whom want the trains renationalised in their entirety. Instead, however, the
government has just opened the bidding to reprivatise the East Coast line, an
unequivocal admission that private profiteering comes before the public
interest. Like a pinstriped necromancer resurrecting his fallen daemon,
Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said
they wanted to “rekindle the spirit of competition”. It’s as welcome as
rekindling smallpox - and much more expensive. Voting won’t change this: all
three parties are unflinching supporters of the privatised rail monopolies.

The public’s patience is waning. In a heart-warming piece on
City AM, Allister Heath wrote
last week that “the public is turning its back on the free market economy”:

“No fewer than 45 per cent of the public believe that the
state should [control] private rents; it was 74-18 for energy prices and 72-19
for public transport… 67 per cent believe Royal Mail should have remained in
the state sector…There is overwhelming support for the nationalisation of
energy companies… There is also huge support for the nationalisation of the
railways, at 66-23.”

These results are apparently “terrifying”. Heath’s
interpretation of the current state of these markets is a peculiar but entirely
orthodox economic fantasy: despite price fixing scandals,
LIBOR fixing, arbitrary
price hikes, our markets are operating at some optimal and ‘natural’
equilibrium which must be protected from “artificial” interference. The message
is quite clear: we will interfere
with prices, you won’t.

Against a backdrop of serious
economic decline and shrinking opportunities, the pantomime debates Brand
rails against are indeed “boring” while also failing to address what is
actually happening. The forces of globalisation, financialisation and
automation have between them been driving down labour’s share of the economic
pie for thirty
years:

“In America,
their wages used to make up almost 70% of GDP; now the figure is 64%, according
to the OECD. Some of the biggest declines have been egalitarian societies such
as Norway (where labour’s
share has fallen from 64% in 1980 to 55% now) and Sweden (down from 74% in 1980 to
65% now)”.

Young people face a future of low paid, ephemeral jobs – or
worse still, workfare
- and insecure yet expensive housing while wealth is increasingly sucked
upwards: living standards are set to fall sharply. The persistently corrupt Westminster has little to
say and less to offer. When old certainties are slipping away people may expect
solutions and ideas from government, or at least a passable impression of representing the public
interest. Instead they find the emperor in his birthday suit, gleefully handing
out the nation’s few remaining assets while defending an extraordinarily
invasive system
of mass surveillance.

Brand’s interview was effective precisely because it was
light, it was populist, it was not complex and, critically, he refused to take Westminster seriously, to
dignify its pretensions with engagement. (It should be added that ‘populist’ is
not intended here in the pejorative sense, in the current climate populism is a
necessary antagonist.) Brand was an ostentatiously silly and “trivial” man yet
the real act was Paxman's, his defence of what is, to a considerable extent,
an elective oligarchy was delivered with deadpan sincerity and studied solemnity.
His solution? ‘Go and vote then’. For “facetiousness” it was Paxman, again,
leading the way.

This is not to suggest any great wisdom on Brand’s part. In
his 4,500
word essay in the New Statesman there seemed little of note. His call for
“total revolution of consciousness and [of] our entire social, political and
economic system”, to be modelled on a “socialist, egalitarian system”, was, as Nick
Cohen replied, “as if we never lived through the 20th century”. Yet it was
a spectacle that caught the public imagination, a figure of high profile
responding to our political system with a combination of disgust and laughter –
and the public roared with approval. It is telling that Nick Clegg has now seen
fit to rebuke
Paxman for saying Brand’s comments were “understandable”; the BBC must under no
circumstances be seen to legitimise this notion of illegitimacy.

“… this is a starkly different political response to a major
economic crisis than the one that took hold after the 1929 crash. While in the
30s people asked for more State either in the form of totalitarianism or in the
social-democracy of the new deal, nowadays protest movements largely see in the
State part of the problem”

Not exactly. The highly successful UK Uncut movement against tax avoidance
is a plea for state action, while the Occupy
manifesto included:

This was not a call for abolition of the state but for its
democratisation. On the right, Eurosceptism is a call for sovereignty of the
nation-state, while ‘getting tough’
on immigration is a direct call for state action – UKIP are no anarchists.
Across the spectrum there is no clear state/anti-state unifier: they are bound
by calls for an end to the corruption of state-corporate synthesis and,
chiefly, the return of the social.
Whether it’s reinstating ownership of utilities to the public, ensuring the
wealthy pay their fair share to the public purse or demands for national
identity to be protected with border controls, there is a recurring note:
public sovereignty. If we are still trapped in a post-08 stasis it is because
the tension between the individual and the social does not sit neatly across the
left-right divide. In the Polanyian
sense people are not seeking only the re-embedding of the economy, but the
re-embedding of society.

Brand’s interview was a “big cultural event” not because he
said either this government or this economic system isn’t working but because he said this democracy isn't working. Will voting Labour in 2015 change any of this?

Oliver Huitson is Co-Editor at OurKingdom and a freelance journalist. He contributed chapters to Jenny Manson's 2012 book, Public Service on the Brink, and NHS SOS (2013). He has written for The Guardian, The New Statesman, Vice and the BBC. He is on Twitter as @OllyHuitson

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